Desperate Men

“Hancock” and “Tell No One.”

Will Smith’s Hancock is a drunken-slob nihilist with supernatural abilities.Credit THOMAS FUCHS

After “Speed Racer,” “Iron Man,” “Indiana Jones,” “The Incredible Hulk,” and “Get Smart” (which is so innocuous that you forget the jokes before you hit the street), it seemed clear that this year’s big summer movies, however spectacular, had lost all interest in making even a minimal emotional connection to the moviegoer. But “Hancock,” starring Will Smith, is a surprisingly resonant spectacle that places three people with recognizable feelings in the middle of a wild fantasy. For one thing, “Hancock” has the grace to acknowledge the audience’s increasing impatience with digital wonders. Hancock (Smith), a lonely superhero in Los Angeles, can’t fly anywhere without making a mess. Carelessly, he punches holes in glass-tower office buildings, and, when he lands on the street in some pleasant suburban neighborhood, he tears up the pavement. The public hates him, and the Dickensian TV lawyer Nancy Grace, of the curling lip and ferocious eye, is on his case. Consider this: A fellow named Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman) is stuck in his car at a railway crossing, and Hancock saves him from an oncoming train by putting up his hands and bringing the locomotive to a jolting halt. The trouble is, the piled-up cars behind the locomotive jackknife and fall off the tracks. Hancock doesn’t mean any harm, but he’s out of it—a heedless, drunken-slob nihilist who just happens to have supernatural abilities. Unlike a comic-book hero, he has no “normal” placid self; he’s always an airborne bum. The grateful Ray, however, has a scheme for saving him. A good-hearted P.R. man, he insists that Hancock “interface with the public.” He persuades him to wear tight-fitting rubber suits, like a proper comic-book hero, and to make smiling appearances at West Hollywood clubs.

“Hancock” was written by Vy Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan, directed by Peter Berg (“The Kingdom”), and produced by such shrewd Hollywood talents as Michael Mann, Jonathan Mostow, and Akiva Goldsman (among others), and, like the people who made “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan,” these filmmakers realize that it’s time to transform digital into meta-digital. If everyone knows that digital has tossed realism overboard, then why not turn that knowingness into a joke? Hancock flips an obnoxious neighborhood kid into the sky and, looking up now and then, carries on a conversation with Ray, only to put out an arm and catch the howling towhead as he falls to earth. That’s a pretty funny trick, and there are others just as good, but when Ray introduces Hancock to his wife, Mary (Charlize Theron), the movie, adding sexual tension and emotional power to its visual gags, reaches a new level. Theron looks at Smith with an uncanny mixture of alarm and attraction. What’s going on with her? He may be a superhero, but he smells of booze. We’re also puzzled by Berg’s visual style, which, in these intimate scenes, depends on a handheld camera, restlessly moving yet pinned to the actors in super-tight closeups. It’s as if he were making a Cassavetes psychodrama.

Suddenly, we realize why he stays so close. We are watching genuine actors at work, not well-paid hired hands filling up the space between agitated zeroes and ones. For the first time in his life, Will Smith doesn’t flirt with the audience. He doesn’t smile and tease and drawl; he stays in character as a self-hating lonely guy, and, in Berg’s closeups, the planes of his face seem massive, almost sculpted. Charlize Theron undergoes her own kind of conversion. In such recent movies as “Monster,” “North Country,” and “In the Valley of Elah,” Theron has drawn on rage—perhaps the anger that a beautiful woman feels toward an industry that initially wanted to confine her to decorative roles. In “Monster,” she covered her face with prosthetics and tattoo ink, and in “Elah” and parts of “North Country” she was severe and drab. But Theron isn’t running away from her good looks anymore. Wearing a simple sleeveless red shift, her blond hair hanging around her shoulders, she’s a knockout in “Hancock,” and she gives the sexiest performance of her career. The currents flowing between her and Smith are reminiscent of the heat generated by Gable and Harlow, say, or Bogart and Bacall. It turns out that there’s a bond between these two (which I won’t reveal), and the rest of the movie, which includes some superb comic invention as well as scarily turbulent scenes, grows out of it. “Hancock” suggests new visual directions and emotional tonalities for pop. It’s by far the most enjoyable big movie of the summer.

The award-winning French thriller “Tell No One” is based on an American mystery novel, by Harlan Coben, that has been transposed to a French setting, and, halfway through the movie, I realized I was very happy that everyone was speaking French. The reason is simple: an American version of this material would have had too many explosions and far too much violence in general, and it would have been similar to thirty other thrillers made here during the past ten years. But the young director, Guillaume Canet, working with the screenwriter Philippe Lefebvre, has set Coben’s material in a realistic social and working world where good-looking, intelligent, and articulate people find one another interesting. La belle France! This emphasis on sociability is not unusual in French commercial filmmaking, but it’s virtually unknown in genre movies made here these days. There is violence—some of it startling, all of it significant—but that’s not what the movie is about.

“Tell No One” is devoted to the explication of a single, devastating event, which we see at the beginning. At a lake deep in the Rambouillet Forest, near Paris, a happily married couple, Dr. Alex Beck (François Cluzet) and his social-worker wife, Margot (Marie-Josée Croze), celebrate their anniversary by going for a naked swim in the moonlight. After resting on a raft, they have a tiny quarrel, and Margot swims ashore. Still lying on the raft, Alex hears a muffled cry from the woods; he swims frantically, but when he climbs out of the water someone clobbers him, and he falls back into the lake. The movie then leaps ahead eight years: Margot was killed that night; Alex, a pediatrician, works in a clinic outside Paris. He’s still in mourning, still eaten up by what happened—by what he didn’t see, by what he doesn’t know. He can never return to his private Eden, the erotic harmony of the forest and the lake, but he longs for it nonetheless.

Animated and charming with children and their parents, Alex, in the rest of his life, has become a stubborn, bitterly reserved man, opening up only to his sister’s girlfriend, played by the English actress Kristin Scott-Thomas (whose French is good). Cluzet, a mainstay of French cinema for more than twenty years, has thick dark hair and a fleeting physical and spiritual resemblance to Dustin Hoffman. Like Hoffman, he’s a preternaturally attentive actor who seems to see more than other people do. The dramatic life of “Tell No One” is centered in Cluzet’s eyes. When messages show up on Alex’s computer suggesting that Margot may still be alive, he’s amazed and, in a state of bafflement, tries to reach her, only to run into the police and half the criminal underworld of Paris. “Tell No One” jumps all over the place but invariably returns to Alex’s need for his wife, who, it turns out, was involved in relationships years ago that he didn’t understand. Past events, like restless ghouls, keep barging into the present, and the many mysteries have to be explained in a long confession at the end. We know the material is artificially—even deviously—constructed, and we enjoy being manipulated by people who know what they’re doing. But it’s Cluzet’s intense performance that makes this genre piece a heart-wrenching experience.

Canet commits one major error: the little clearing in the forest that Alex and Margot have been visiting since they were children can be entered only between parallel columns of gorgeous pink-orange rhododendron bushes, a Disney touch that we see twice and that converts sentiment into a mawkish sanctification of eternal love. Otherwise, he moves a talented cast skillfully through a large and varied world. It’s a remarkably well-populated movie—fleshed out not just with Alex’s family and friends but with a relentless group of high-tech thugs, including a female sadist with a long neck and powerful hands, which she uses to squeeze her victims in tender places (not the obvious ones). And there is the volatile criminal Bruno (Gilles Lellouche), a lowlife so indebted to Alex for his treatment of Bruno’s little boy that he becomes a loyal friend and protector—an armed guardian angel. Bounced back and forth between these killers, Alex has some unsettling adventures and, in small increments, learns about the past. We’re meant to be a little lost, too—tantalized by hints and partial appearances and echoes. Underneath all the mysteries, however, some powerful forces are at work—the corrupting effects of a great fortune, and the love of fathers for children, which causes two old men (Jean Rochefort and André Dussollier) to do vile things. This is a thriller that’s more about discovery than about action. Alex’s search for Margot becomes a search for truth. He can’t tell the two quests apart, and, while watching “Tell No One,” neither can we. ♦

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